Wednesday, July 12, 2017

Bullets: KILL OR BE KILLED #10 Out Today, Sean Phillips Art in AMC's Preacher, and More!

We have a few things to cover before we head out to our local comics shop.

• Kill Or Be Killed #10 Out Today, with a Preview and Extra Pages? After a brief delay, the finale to the second arc of Brubaker and Phillips' ongoing vigilante series reaches stores today: Image Comics is featuring the issue on its homepage this week, with cover art from issue #11...

...and just yesterday the site posted a four-page preview of issue #10, focusing on the NYPD task force assigned to catch the masked serial killer.

The irony is quite humorous, that the cops are trying to infer some deep significance in what we know to be Dylan's very haphazard behavior, but we can understand their hope for a pattern in his behavior: if the killer's actions are random, he's all the less likely to be caught.

And, whether the demon is real or a delusion, none of the detectives would imagine that their prey is killing bad guys trying to fulfill a supernatural monster's monthly quota.

Since the narration seems to pick up from the prior issue's cliffhanger, we presume that the preview comes from this issue's first few pages, and we see that the action opens on some natural scenery that surrounds the very unnatural scene of the crime.

Between Sean Phillps' inks and Bettie Breitweiser's colors, the artwork is beautiful but eerie.

In addition to this official preview, we expect an email newsletter from Ed Brubaker any time now, with more inside info and possibly additional artwork. Interested readers should subscribe to the newsletter, but everyone can check out the online archives.

In the meantime, we noticed something of interest in ComicList's extended preview for Image Comics, posted last week. Look what's included in the list of product changes:

• KILL OR BE KILLED TP VOL. 2 will now run 176 pages, not 160 pages, with no change in price.

This trade paperback will collect issues #5-10. By my count, the first five issues comprise 121 pages, with Kira's story in issue #7 having one page more than the typical 24 pages of story, not counting extra content.

This leaves some 55 pages of story for today's issue, and the additional content would quite easily explain its delay.

[UPDATE: Just read the new issue, and it only has 26 pages, meaning the second arc comprises 147 pages. Either that product update is in error, or the Volume 2 TPB has much more content than we expect.]

• Kill Or Be Killed #11 Delayed a Week, Preview Art Appearing Online. In the newest extended forecast for Image Comics, ComicList confirms our prediction that issue #11 would be pushed back a week, to coincide with the delayed release of the Volume 2 trade paperback. Both are now scheduled for an August 9th release.

Last week, Sean Phillips posted some work-in-progress inks all evidently from this issue, including a pensive panel or two of Dylan, a panel of Kira we're reposting below, and a panel of the two once (and future?) lovers.

Phillips previously posted a panel of a new character from the series and artwork of Rita Hayworth, both in various stages of progress and evidently completed. We suspect that this artwork of Ms. Hayworth will accompany an essay in the back of Kill Or Be Killed, in the issue for this month or next month -- though presumably not (just) for her important reference in The Shawshank Redemption.

[UPDATE, 7/28, later than planned: In the comments below, Sean explains that the Hayworth artwork is not for a bonus essay but is, instead, for a separate project, to be announced soon.]

• Sean Phillips Artwork in AMC's Preacher -- and the Artist in a Romance Comic? Finally, Sean Phillips was commissioned to create a poster that appeared in the July 3rd episode of AMC's Preacher, the series based on the Vertigo comic by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon. In addition to the screenshot we're reposting below, Phillips posted the sketches and final artwork on his blog.

Phillips' initial tweet of the poster art elicited more than 500 likes (625 as of right now), the most any single tweet of his has ever received.

As well as posting his recent work, Sean has also posted quite old work from his friend and colleague Pete Doree, as well as a comic strip that they did together with their friend David Holman. At his own blog, Doree writes that this particular strip was for Leeds' Thought Bubble festival, and it captures how the three of them experienced the Bronze Age of comics as kids.

But that work from Doree includes a very interesting character, a kind, gentle bachelor by the name of Sean Phillips: the non-fictional Phillips writes that Doree plans to post the fictional Phillips' entire story on his blog.

[UPDATE, 7/28, later than planned: Again in the comments, Sean corrects how we misread the exchange: the panel is from an old romance comic produced by Marvel in the 1970s, which Doree pointed to Phillips because of the entirely coincidental naming of the unrequited lover.]